“What are we saying?” Linda asked. “That Lawrence is a crypto-Nazi?”
“I think that might be a bit of a leap from one odd picture,” Rep said.
“I don’t know about crypto-Nazi, but we have more than a picture to suggest pathological anti-semite,” Melissa said as she grabbed a page from her computer’s printer. “Look at this. Missouri isn’t the only place that had a famous General Order Number 11. General Grant also issued one that was signed by his chief of staff, General John Rawlins.”
Linda and Rep pressed around Melissa to read the page she held:
The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the [D]epartment [of the Tennessee] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order. Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.
“According to the note on this website,” Melissa said, “the Department of the Tennessee included Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. So Grant’s General Order Number 11 exiled all the Jews in three states under military occupation. Lincoln made Grant rescind the order a few weeks later.”
“Maybe we’re going too fast,” Linda said. “Mr. Lawrence is cultured, sophisticated, literate, generous, and well-mannered.”
“So was Brassilach,” Melissa said. “And he sat serenely in his office and called for Jewish children to be rounded up and sent to death camps.”
“Well,” Rep said, “I’m duly taken aback. I think we’ve peaked. Tonight isn’t likely to generate any further information quite as dramatic as this.”
The phone rang.
Rep answered it with a simple “Hello.” No name or place. That was the way fate had decreed he would talk on the phone to his own mother. The caller dispensed with preliminaries as well.
“I’ve seen the name Anita Lay in the credits for so-called quality adult films, but I suspect it’s generic, not the screen name of a particular actress.”
“‘Quality’ adult film as opposed to what kind?” Rep couldn’t help asking.
“As opposed to quickies for specialty tastes, like my clients have, which are basically infomercials, and garden variety skin-flicks that just get right down to it. Quality are longer running, with actual story lines, dialogue—even multiple camera angles. Some actors and actresses get famous starring in movies like that. They have regular screen names, and they use them in movie after movie. Others, though, are just paying the rent while they wait for Quentin Tarantino to cast them in something legitimate. They show up in the credits under generic names that are usually lame puns—like Anita Lay. The actresses change, but the names stay the same.”
“What’s ‘Anita Lay’ a pun for?” Rep asked. “Oh. Never mind.”
“Right.”
“So, in other words, the particular woman we’re wondering about could be any blonde in her early twenties.”
“Well, not just any blonde. She’s almost certainly an aspiring actress living in southern California.”
“Why do you say that?” Rep asked. “Why couldn’t she just have picked the name up from watching some, er, quality adult films?”
“Oh come on. These aren’t exactly chick-flicks, are they? And even the guys who watch them couldn’t tell you any name in the credits after the second line. GET YOUR NOSE BACK IN THAT CORNER THIS SECOND, YOUNG MAN! YOU’RE BEING PUNISHED AND YOU’RE IN DISGRACE! Sorry, that last part wasn’t directed at you. I have a client here.”
“Understood,” Rep said. “I see your point. Still, ‘aspiring actress living in southern California’ doesn’t narrow it down very much.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” the caller said. “Any wannabe starlet who leaves LA for KC in June is looking for a fat payday.”
“Where would the payday come from?”
“A sugar daddy who’d have a limo meet her at the airport, put her up in the best suite in the best hotel in town, and plan on spending a weekend worth of quality time with her.”
“Doesn’t fit,” Rep said. “Unless there are sugar daddies with a taste for date-rape drugs.”
“What did you just say? This chick was feeding ropes to johns?”
“If ‘ropes’ means Rohypnol, that super German sleeping pill that guys sometimes slip into cocktails, then that’s what she was doing.”
“That’s what ‘ropes’ means. Well, that makes it obvious, doesn’t it?”
“To half of us, apparently,” Rep said.
“She wanted to get a guy into what we used to blushingly call a compromising position. Find someone in Kansas City who could be blackmailed into tucking a billion-dollar tax-break into a budget bill or quashing a drug investigation, and I’ll bet you’ve found Anita Lay’s target.”
“How about someone who could sell ten million copies of Star magazine by being shown on the cover with his pants down?” Rep asked.
“Bingo.”
“Thanks.” Rep hung up and summarized his mother’s well-informed conclusions for Linda and Melissa.
“You mean whoever she was, she came here just to set up a phony picture of Peter committing adultery?” Linda asked.
“Sure,” Rep said. “Peter became an instant, mini-celebrity for turning down a proposition on television. You can bet some scandal sheet would pay middle five figures for pictures that it could headline ‘REALITY CHECK’S “GOOD” HUSBAND CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST.’ ”
“That’s why Peter thought he’d done something terrible,” Linda sniffled, near tears again but this time from happiness. “Not because he’d killed Quinlan. Because of the drug he couldn’t remember exactly what happened, but he remembered enough to think he’d been unfaithful to me.”
“I’d bet that way,” Melissa said. “But she presumably got her pictures, so you two are going to have to brace for a couple of weeks worth of ugly ink.”
“Well,” Rep said modestly, “the intellectual property bar might have something to say about that.”
“You mean threaten to sue them for libel?” Melissa asked skeptically.
“No, I mean threaten to libel them.”
“You’re being opaque again, dear.”
“I have the e-mail address of the general counsel for every tabloid in the country,” Rep said.
“Do they all owe you favors?” Linda asked.
“They’ll think they do after I pass on a hot tip that police in Kansas City are looking into charges of second degree sexual assault involving the drug-assisted rape of Peter Damon by a self-proclaimed starlet who let slip that she was working for their papers.”
“But only one of them is guilty,” Melissa said.
“That’s what makes it libel. The ones that aren’t guilty will start chasing down the story. The paper that actually gave that bimbo an advance will know that its rivals will crucify it if it runs the story. Which it wouldn’t anyway, once its lawyers told it about accessory before the fact, aiding and abetting, criminal conspiracy, and extradition. It might not work, but it’s sure worth a shot.”
Melissa saw Linda’s face come alive with a gently radiant glow. She loves deeply and fiercely, Melissa thought. She could have killed for that love. But Melissa banished all thought of cross-examining Linda or checking the VW’s odometer. Sometime in the last twenty minutes, she’d made a decision. I love justice, Camus had said, but I’d defend my mother in court. Guilty or innocent, Linda was her friend. Guilty or innocent, she needed Melissa’s unqualified and unconditional support, and guilty or innocent she’d have it. If Linda had killed Quinlan, someone else was going to have to prove it.
For the first time since she’d realized
Tuttle was going to slap her, Melissa’s shoulders relaxed. They stayed relaxed for almost five seconds. Until the scream.
Chapter 19
“Stop him! Don’t let him get to the west stairwell!”
This command came out of the darkness in Klimchock’s piercing contralto as Rep, Melissa, and Linda rushed into a halo of light outside the acquisition head’s office. Rep had no idea where west was. He vaguely recalled that row upon row of seven-foot metal shelves holding books and bound periodicals started perhaps fifteen feet away. Beyond that, he didn’t have the first clue about the layout of the mostly pitch black third floor of the Jackson County Public Library.
He groped his way toward the first row of shelving and then down that row, away from the sound of Klimchock’s voice, to a wide aisle running along the ends of the rows. He began to jog cautiously down this aisle and had passed the ends of three rows when, incredibly, he heard the thump-thump of running feet hustling along a parallel aisle on the other end of the rows.
Two, three, four more rows and then abruptly he lost the sound. He backtracked a row picked the thumps up again, a bit fainter this time, as if the runner were now moving away from him. He turned and began running between two rows, toward the aisle at the other end and, presumably, another set of shelves beyond that aisle.
As his eyes adjusted to the blackness he was able to make out a dim suggestion of a figure running only thirty or forty feet ahead of him. Rep didn’t regard himself as particularly athletic. He’d once joked about timing a three-mile jog with a calendar, and no one had laughed. Astonishingly, though, he sensed himself gaining on the runner. Within a dozen strides he had crossed the intervening aisle and halved the distance separating him from his quarry. He began to wonder what he might do if he actually caught the guy (or, he supposed, gal).
The runner started pulling books from the shelves to the floor as he ran, presumably in an effort to impede Rep’s pursuit. Rep stumbled a couple of times, but at the end of the row the runner slowed to turn down the intersecting aisle and suddenly Rep was less than ten feet from him. Rep reached for everything he could to quicken his pace.
Suddenly the runner whirled in Rep’s direction. At that instant, Rep’s right instep hit a thick tome and he found himself airborne and horizontal. He saw a muzzle flash and heard the booming POW! of a gunshot. Shortly after that he was still horizontal but no longer airborne, for gravity had performed in its predictable way and he sprawled painfully on the linoleum floor.
Rep scrambled to his feet but then immediately fell to one knee as his throbbing right ankle gave way. The lights came on. An alarm bell began to ring. He heard scurrying steps—behind him, this time—and turned to see Klimchock, Melissa, and Linda hurrying toward him through a swarm of black dots. He began to drag himself toward the end of the row, in the faint hope that he could at least glimpse the fugitive now that the lights were on.
“No, no, dear,” Klimchock said, laying a restraining hand on his shoulder as she came up and knelt beside him. “Discretion the better part of valor and all that. He has a gun and we don’t, so he wins this round. End of issue, full stop. Remember, the spirit of Dunkirk is running away so that you can fight another day. Besides, that alarm means that he’s opened the emergency door at the bottom of the west stairwell. He’s long gone.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Rep said.
“Are you hurt?” Melissa asked.
“Dinged my ankle,” Rep admitted.
“That must have been a nasty fall,” she said.
“A lucky one, though,” Rep said. He had by now gotten his shoe and sock off and was examining his swelling ankle. “Without my stumble that bullet might have hit something important.”
Melissa glanced down the aisle at the thick tome he’d stumbled over. The title on the spine read Burr.
“How ironic,” she said. “The greatest service Gore Vidal has ever rendered to American literature is saving your life.”
“That’s a sweet thing to say,” Rep said, managing a wan smile.
“You obviously haven’t read much of Mr. Vidal’s work,” she said.
“With the alarm and the shot, police will be here soon,” Rep said. “It might be best if Linda were somewhere else when they arrived.”
“Just so,” Klimchock said. “So perhaps I was here alone.”
“Up to a point, Lord Zinc,” Melissa said.
“That means ‘no,’ ” Linda explained to Rep. “It’s from Evelyn Waugh.”
“Right,” Rep said to Klimchock. “You were here with all three of us when we talked to Lafayette Wyatt and when we all left time-of-use data on telephones and computers on this floor.”
“Then what happened?” Klimchock asked. “In case the bobbies ask.”
“Then,” Melissa said, “I think Linda had to help me take Rep somewhere to care for his ankle. While you waited for the police.”
“Right, got it,” Klimchock said, focusing as intensely as if she were prepping for her final in Greats at Oxford. “And where did you go?”
“Uh, well,” Rep said, “you don’t know that, do you?”
“No, of course not. Ah, right, got it. Off you go then, to wherever.”
“It can’t be a coincidence. We’ve been thinking about this whole problem backwards.”
Rep muttered this statement rather drowsily about forty-five minutes later. Pillows propped him up in the bed in Linda’s hotel room, his right ankle clumsily wrapped in ice-cube stuffed towels and his neurons sedated with Advil.
“What can’t be a coincidence and what do you mean backwards?” Melissa asked, not unreasonably.
“I’ve heard a fair number of live gunshots in my life, from duck hunting to sighting-in to the encampment,” Rep said.
“And a shotgun doesn’t sound like a rifle or a rifle like a handgun, I’m betting,” Melissa said.
“Not only that. A thirty-thirty doesn’t sound like a thirty-ought-six, and neither of them sounds like a rifled musket. The gunshot tonight sounded like the revolvers I heard on the firing range at the encampment. No judge would let my impression into evidence, but you can take it to the bank. The intruder’s gun was a Civil War era replica revolver.”
“Honey,” Melissa said, “maybe you’d better get to the backwards part.”
“We’ve been assuming that Quinlan getting killed while Peter was out there for the encampment is some kind of grotesque coincidence. Assume that it’s not a coincidence—that, it’s all connected.”
“I’m assuming,” Linda said. “I’m not getting anywhere.”
“Sometime after you took Peter upstairs last night, Peter saw something totally unexpected that sent him hurtling away the moment he was certain you were all right. What was it?”
“Well, beloved,” Melissa said, “we don’t know, do we?”
“Yes we do. It was a problem with the library expansion funding, and Peter’s role in getting it. That’s what he said in his note to Klimchock.”
“Which leaves only the detail that we don’t know exactly what the problem was,” Linda pointed out.
“That’s right,” Melissa said, snapping her fingers, “but we do know it must be something very dramatic in the editorial offices and that it’s related to what got Quinlan killed, with Peter neatly framed for the murder.”
“And we know that—how?” Linda asked.
“Because otherwise it’s coincidence,” Rep said, “and I’m not buying it.”
“So all we have to do,” Melissa said brightly, “since the police would laugh in our faces just before they arrested us if we went to them with this, is figure out for ourselves what Peter saw.”
“Well,” Rep said, “for a group that just accounted for Gore Vidal’s single greatest contribution to American literature, that should be a piece of cake.”
Chapter 20
“Welcome to the house that crack built,” Norm Archer said as he showed Rep, Melissa and Linda into his office�
��or into what Rep took to be his office, for it might have passed as easily for a small law library or a large storeroom. Two library tables scarred with nicks and cigarette burns formed a T toward the near wall of the high-ceilinged room. Hard-bound volumes of Vernon’s Annotated Missouri Statutes and West’s Southwest 2d Reporter lined the walls. No water, coffee, or ashtrays. Archer apparently didn’t want his typical clients to linger.
He pointed his visitors to chairs on either side of the T’s leg and seated himself at its apex. Folding hands two shades darker than a grocery sack in front of him after he’d adjusted his white suspender straps a quarter-inch on each shoulder, he looked at each of them in turn with coolly appraising eyes, neither judgmental nor accepting. Late forties or early fifties, Melissa thought. Bristly white hair, more than a hint of a paunch, but definitely not fat.
“All right,” he said in a voice that suggested a drill sergeant slightly (but only slightly) mellowed by age and miles, “what do we have?”
He heard them through twice, the first time without questions and the second time with. He didn’t take a note from beginning to end. Below the neck, in fact, he scarcely moved at all.
“You have no idea where Peter is?” he asked after the encore.
“Right,” Linda said.
“Well, I expect we’ll know soon,” Archer said. “In a job-one case like this the cops will have a preliminary report on that saber by ten o’clock—and it sure won’t take them long to find him. Unless he’s flown the coop.”
“No,” Linda said, shaking her head. “Peter wouldn’t run.”
“He won’t run far, that’s for sure,” he muttered. Then, abruptly twisting his head over his right shoulder toward the office door, he raised his voice to bark, “Streeter. Miss Phelps.”
A white man in his early twenties and a grandmotherly African-American woman answered the summons, which had apparently penetrated the substantial door without difficulty.
“Monitor the police band on short wave,” he told the man. “Any chatter about arresting Peter Damon, I wanna know A-sap. All we can do is hope he keeps his mouth shut until I talk to him. Miss Phelps, please take these ladies down to the coffee shop get them something to drink. Mrs. Damon is giving blood this morning and she should have some fluids beforehand.”
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